I'm not sure what a right to water really means.

A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.

Framing the lawsuit as a demand for free water or to create new amendments is actually absurd.

In this case, the plaintiffs did not claim a constitutional "right to water." They claimed a violation of the *existing 14th Amendment's Due Process.

Some of *this case's judges agreed with this view. They directly cited the 2019 ruling from Flint, Michigan: a government knowingly pumping lead into homes while lying about public safety is an outrageous, conscience-shocking violation of the Constitution.

The Fourteenth Amendment protects bodily integrity. This means the government cannot actively harm your physical body without due process of law to enact that bodily harm against you.

- Officials altered the water supply and ignored treatment failures, making the tap water toxic.

- Officials knowingly lied to residents that the water was safe.

- This deception induced residents to drink poisoned water and ingest lead.

- Deliberately poisoning citizens and covering it up violates bodily integrity.

EDIT: The dissent begins on page 14 if you want to see the complete analysis:

https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...

I suppose it means that has to be available to you somehow, the easiest example perhaps being that if you're renting in such a place, the landlord is obligated to ensure access.

Imagine your well becomes contaminated. That might be natural, or it might be caused by eg fracking. If the latter, do you have any rights and recourse and does it make a difference if the poisoner is state, federal or private?

(I’m curious of my own situation as a European with my own well and also not so far from a well documented case against the government because their airbase fire fighting had contaminated groundwater with PFAS.)

I think it's covered under that "right to life" section of the Constitution. Deliberately poisoning people through their water supply seems like a sure-fire way to deny the right to life of your citizens.

If the ground water is contaminated with industrial waste ?

> I'm not sure what a right to water really means.

Right to safe water. It means that the water in your kitchen faucet is expected/guaranteed to be safe to drink.

It must not have: noxious bacteria causing diarrhea, or liver parasite eggs, or mud, or mercury/heavy metals, or remains of faeces, or fracking methane, or pesticides, or medicines, or obesogens [1].

It must had been professionally filtered and treated to assure that none of those reach your home.

If you pay for water classified as "drinking water", you should not receive grey water, soapy bubbles, oily mud or anything else. This is the standard in all first country nations and I assume that it should be the same in US.

[1] And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important.

The first paragraph of tfa:

> lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The "right" here is about other people not contaminating your well for their profit. You don't have that right. They can contaminate your well for their profit and you have to find another source of water at your own cost.

Could we please not? In the first sentence of the article:

> (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Surely you can see an issue there? Can we please make a collected effort to comment beyond the title?

If you don’t know what “a right to safe water” means, then could you please do a web search to try to be minimally informed about the matter before commenting? Took me two seconds to find a UN page.

https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s...

Again, on the first sentence, in bold:

> Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity.

And on the second paragraph:

> Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements

There’s your right to water. It means that because it’s something fundamental to human life, nations have an (at a minimum moral, often legal) obligation to provide it or protect access to it to everyone under them that lacks it.

Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

Again, the first sentence already explains a lot.

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